New WD Black SN750 SSD Slashes Prices, Adds 2TB Model

Western Digital has launched its new SN750 SSD (full name: Western Digital WD Black SN750), with a few updated features and capabilities, including a tweaked firmware intended to boost performance. The new drives will also be offered in a separate retail package with an included custom heatsink designed by EKWB. Whether said heatsink is necessary or an improvement compared with the standard M.2 heatsinks that are built into many motherboards these days is something reviewers will have to test, but if you like the black anodized aluminum cover look, it’s something to consider.

According to Anandtech, the gamer-oriented features of the SSD amount to disabling system features that allow the drive to slip into its lowest power states. This will slightly improve performance, provided that your system wasn’t already configured for this in the first place.

It’s harder to pick out a single benchmark from Anandtech’s stack that actually captures the drive’s overall performance in a single test, so I’ll just say this. While the rankings change depending on which specific workloads you examine, the SN750 is often at or near the top. Anandtech writes:

For all practical purposes, the new WD Black SN750 can be regarded as more or less identical to its predecessor, except that the SN750 is launching at far better prices, and will soon be adding a 2TB model.

By 2018 standards, the new WD Black is still a very competitive high-end NVMe SSD, and probably the best overall SSD using Toshiba/SanDisk 3D NAND.

Happily, the sheer amount of storage on tap provides additional impetus to upgrade where raw performance might not suffice. SSD prices may still come down in 2019, but the current drops have brought them into very agreeable territory already.